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I have been with Talk Talk for over 7 years and estimate to have given them around £4,000.00 in that time. I have had nothing but problems with them recently and now they have charged me for an engineer visit and want to charge me to move away from them.
Some of the problems in the past have been reasonably minor, like messing up my call add-ons such as reminder calls and it taking 6 months to get it sorted out. However, the main issues have been with my broadband.
I am a reasonable distance from the exchange and, as standard, I can only get around 3.8Mb/s speed. I could work with this fine but it all went pear shaped in October 2013 when my broadband router failed. They wouldn't send out a new router but insisted an engineer came out. He diagnosed it was a faulty router and replaced it but decided I should be getting faster than 4Mb/s so upped my speed. As my line couldn't handle the extra speed the connection would just hang, sometimes for several minutes, with nothing getting through. I rang the help desk repeatedly and they could see there was an issue but couldn't do anything about it and it would need to be passed to a different department who didn't do anything. Eventually one of the help desk put me through to someone who could make the changes, which he did, and everything worked fine for a few days. Unfortunately they have software that monitors the connection and if there aren't many errors speeds it up. So I was back to square one with it set too fast again. After several more calls to the help desk and being told they couldn't put me through to anyone else and no one could change the settings other than one of their engineers who I couldn't speak to but they would log it with them. Now, you need to bear in mind that Talk Talk's customer services are in India (or somewhere similar) so it is sometimes hard to understand them and they struggle to understand me. For example, after over half an hour with one agent pleading with her to slow down my connection speed due to all the errors, she stated that there was no point speeding it up, even to 24Mb/s, as it would just cause more errors! Other times I had statements such as "Nobody ever asks to have the speed slowed down!". The amount of times I had to go through the same "tests" was ridiculous!
This went on for months! Finally, near the end of April 2014, I found Talk Talk's online forum and the engineers that accessed this actually understood the issue and helped. Two weeks later it was all sorted. So it only took 7 months!
That's just the background of the issues I have had with them.
Once that was finally sorted I moved to Fibre broadband as I needed more speed. This came with Talk Talk TV and, of course, a new contract.
The Talk Talk TV Box started playing up in January 2015 but apparently it is not their problem and I was advised, by another forum user, to buy a different box. As I wanted sport anyway and Sky had a decent offer on I took out a package with them so the Talk Talk box is now redundant anyway.
Now we move to the recent issue. Around May 3rd this year my internet went really flaky. Pages were timing out or only partly loading and it would take several refreshes (7 or 8 times normally) to get anything to load. It was great timing as I needed to book some flights and there was no way I could do it with my connection so bad. I also couldn't access my emails as they would just time out. This wasn't machine related as it was the same on everything I had connected to the internet. So, it was either the router again (although it was a new one for the fibre connection) or something in the external wiring or routing. So basically not caused by anything of mine. Again they sent out an engineer, on Friday the 8th May. He connected his equipment directly to my test socket and couldn't connect either, confirming the issue was further down the line. He could detect a fault in the line, which would be down to BT Openreach, so arranged for one of their engineers to look at it. The earliest they could manage was Friday the 15th May. When I went to bed on the 14th (or early hours of the 15th) the problem was still there. However, having got up early (as the engineer could come any time after 7AM) everything was working fine. Someone had resolved the fault remotely and I assumed it was the BT Engineer. Just after 7AM, the engineer rang and I explained it was all now working OK but he decided he would come out and run some tests anyway. He thought it sounded like a problem with one of Talk Talk's servers which they had probably fixed earlier that morning and confirmed everything now looked fine.
Today I checked my bank balance and Talk Talk had taken a larger than normal Direct Debit out of my account. They had charged me £65.00 for the engineer visit as I hadn't cancelled it 24 hours in advance (i.e. while there was still the fault) and because he had found no fault! They even have a whole department for people complaining about being charged for engineer visits and whatever they say goes. Despite agreeing that their own engineer had diagnosed a fault and hence there was a fault, as the BT Openreach engineer didn't find a fault, there was never a fault and I had to pay.
I have now arranged to move my telephone and broadband supply to Sky but of course Talk Talk want to charge me £230.00+ to cancel my account early. They have recently increased their prices that would have allowed me to cancel my account without charge but this had to be done within so many days of them sending an email about it. Guess when that was sent! 8th May when I couldn't access my emails and, with the amount of spam I receive, the mail box on the server would have been filled up by then anyway so it never arrived.
Firstly, obviously I want my £65.00 back and secondly I want to avoid having to pay Talk Talk more money to get rid of them. I have cancelled the Direct Debit for now as they all but overdrew my account this morning anyway!
Does anyone have any advice as to what would be my best course of action and where I can go from here?
Some of the problems in the past have been reasonably minor, like messing up my call add-ons such as reminder calls and it taking 6 months to get it sorted out. However, the main issues have been with my broadband.
I am a reasonable distance from the exchange and, as standard, I can only get around 3.8Mb/s speed. I could work with this fine but it all went pear shaped in October 2013 when my broadband router failed. They wouldn't send out a new router but insisted an engineer came out. He diagnosed it was a faulty router and replaced it but decided I should be getting faster than 4Mb/s so upped my speed. As my line couldn't handle the extra speed the connection would just hang, sometimes for several minutes, with nothing getting through. I rang the help desk repeatedly and they could see there was an issue but couldn't do anything about it and it would need to be passed to a different department who didn't do anything. Eventually one of the help desk put me through to someone who could make the changes, which he did, and everything worked fine for a few days. Unfortunately they have software that monitors the connection and if there aren't many errors speeds it up. So I was back to square one with it set too fast again. After several more calls to the help desk and being told they couldn't put me through to anyone else and no one could change the settings other than one of their engineers who I couldn't speak to but they would log it with them. Now, you need to bear in mind that Talk Talk's customer services are in India (or somewhere similar) so it is sometimes hard to understand them and they struggle to understand me. For example, after over half an hour with one agent pleading with her to slow down my connection speed due to all the errors, she stated that there was no point speeding it up, even to 24Mb/s, as it would just cause more errors! Other times I had statements such as "Nobody ever asks to have the speed slowed down!". The amount of times I had to go through the same "tests" was ridiculous!
This went on for months! Finally, near the end of April 2014, I found Talk Talk's online forum and the engineers that accessed this actually understood the issue and helped. Two weeks later it was all sorted. So it only took 7 months!
That's just the background of the issues I have had with them.
Once that was finally sorted I moved to Fibre broadband as I needed more speed. This came with Talk Talk TV and, of course, a new contract.
The Talk Talk TV Box started playing up in January 2015 but apparently it is not their problem and I was advised, by another forum user, to buy a different box. As I wanted sport anyway and Sky had a decent offer on I took out a package with them so the Talk Talk box is now redundant anyway.
Now we move to the recent issue. Around May 3rd this year my internet went really flaky. Pages were timing out or only partly loading and it would take several refreshes (7 or 8 times normally) to get anything to load. It was great timing as I needed to book some flights and there was no way I could do it with my connection so bad. I also couldn't access my emails as they would just time out. This wasn't machine related as it was the same on everything I had connected to the internet. So, it was either the router again (although it was a new one for the fibre connection) or something in the external wiring or routing. So basically not caused by anything of mine. Again they sent out an engineer, on Friday the 8th May. He connected his equipment directly to my test socket and couldn't connect either, confirming the issue was further down the line. He could detect a fault in the line, which would be down to BT Openreach, so arranged for one of their engineers to look at it. The earliest they could manage was Friday the 15th May. When I went to bed on the 14th (or early hours of the 15th) the problem was still there. However, having got up early (as the engineer could come any time after 7AM) everything was working fine. Someone had resolved the fault remotely and I assumed it was the BT Engineer. Just after 7AM, the engineer rang and I explained it was all now working OK but he decided he would come out and run some tests anyway. He thought it sounded like a problem with one of Talk Talk's servers which they had probably fixed earlier that morning and confirmed everything now looked fine.
Today I checked my bank balance and Talk Talk had taken a larger than normal Direct Debit out of my account. They had charged me £65.00 for the engineer visit as I hadn't cancelled it 24 hours in advance (i.e. while there was still the fault) and because he had found no fault! They even have a whole department for people complaining about being charged for engineer visits and whatever they say goes. Despite agreeing that their own engineer had diagnosed a fault and hence there was a fault, as the BT Openreach engineer didn't find a fault, there was never a fault and I had to pay.
I have now arranged to move my telephone and broadband supply to Sky but of course Talk Talk want to charge me £230.00+ to cancel my account early. They have recently increased their prices that would have allowed me to cancel my account without charge but this had to be done within so many days of them sending an email about it. Guess when that was sent! 8th May when I couldn't access my emails and, with the amount of spam I receive, the mail box on the server would have been filled up by then anyway so it never arrived.
Firstly, obviously I want my £65.00 back and secondly I want to avoid having to pay Talk Talk more money to get rid of them. I have cancelled the Direct Debit for now as they all but overdrew my account this morning anyway!
Does anyone have any advice as to what would be my best course of action and where I can go from here?
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